Monday, December 12, 2011

KDP Select

First let me share the fact that I saw the movie "In Time" this weekend and it was awesome. Predictable ending, yes, it usually is for me, but I still loved it. Pretty good pace, great acting and best of all: wonderful concept that can be relegated to today's society. Justin Timberlake is one of the tripple threats of Hollywood (he can dance, sing, act). I have to say I didn't like him and the curly blond hair when he was with NSYNC, but now truly enjoy him as an artist.

I've also added a new ' About Me page to my blog, so feel free to check it out. I also 'tried to change the background to look like this, but failed. It's one of the images that was used when making the cover for Two Halves. That's how high tech I get. The photo I have is to big in size and I can't seem to compress it without compromising the pixels. I'll keep working on it later.

Now, KDP Select. Last week Amazon launched its new lending program. There's been a lot of buzz and discussion about it on the internet including the Kindleboards, Twitter and here. If you would like to find out more, click here to link directly to Amazon.

I must say I enjoy all the discussions, pros and cons, but here's my take on it and why I didn't enroll:

1. There is no guarantee you will make any of the $500,000 pool available. If no one borrows your book, you get 0% of the pool which equals 0.

2. 90 days, opt in period is a long period of time for me. I have booked too many promotional items for the next three months to take advantage of KDP Select.3. You have to pull your titles from other distributors such as Smashwords and B&N. I can imagine someone saying they 'pulled' the title out, changed it a little, then put it back in to those distributors and continue selling. I've already seen threads on this on the Kindleboards.

4. I have a problem when competition is thrown out of the equation. Having a bit of a background in Economics, I know that competition is a good thing. Once it's out, things can change for the worse very fast for both readers, authors and publishers. We need competition and allowing my title to be exclusively with Amazon is not for me.

This program may be good for some and not for others, only time and testing will decide. There is a lot of factors that come into play as well: the genre you write in, how well known you are, how many other titles you have (perhaps boosting reader awareness through the program can lead them to your other titles) and many more.

3 comments:

There's just something about the way Amazon are going about things that makes me uneasy. They seem to want to do it all by themselves, missing out publishers, bookshops, libraries. The writers are just one of the losers.